Henry and June: From "A Journal of Love" -The Unexpurgated Diary of Anaïs Nin (1931-1932) (12 page)

Today I meet Fred, and as we walk towards Trinité together the sun comes out of a rain cloud and blinds us. And I begin quoting from his writing about a sunny morning in the market, which touches him. He has told me I am good for Henry, that I give him things June couldn't give him. And yet he admits that Henry is entirely in June's power when she is there. June is stronger. I am growing to love Henry more than June.

Fred marvels at how Henry can love two women at the same time. "He is a big big man," he says. "There's so much room in him, so much love. If I loved you, I couldn't love another woman." And I was thinking: I am like Henry. I can love Hugo and Henry and June.

Henry, I understand your clasping June and me. One doesn't exclude the other. But June may not feel this, and certainly you didn't understand June clasping you and Jean together. No, you demanded a choice.

We are going to taste all we can give each other. Before June comes we are going to lie together as often as possible. Our happiness is in danger, yes, but we are going to devour it quickly, thoroughly. For every day of it I am thankful.

Letter to June: "This morning I awakened with a profound and desperate desire for you. I have strange dreams. Now you are small and soft and pliable in my arms, now you are powerful and domineering and the leader. At once mothlike and indomitable. June, what are you? I know you wrote Henry a love letter, and I suffered. I have found at least one joy and that is to be able to talk openly about you to Henry. I did it because I knew he would love you more. I gave him
my
June, the portrait of you I wrote down during the days we were together.... Now I can say to Henry, 'I love June,' and he does not combat our feelings, he does not abhor them. He is moved. And you, June? What does it mean that you have not written me?...Am I a dream to you, am I not real and warm for you? What new loves, new ecstasies, new impulses move you now? I know you don't like to write. I don't ask for long letters, only a few words, what you feel. Have you ever wished yourself back here in my house, in my room, and do you have regrets that we were so overwhelmed? Do you ever wish to live those hours over again and differently, with more confidence. June, I hesitate to write everything, as if I felt again that you would run downstairs to escape me, as you did that day, or almost.

"I'm sending you my book on Lawrence and the cape. I love you, June, and you know how acutely, how desperately. You know that no one can say or do anything to shake my love. I have taken you into myself, whole. You need have no fear of being unmasked, only loved."

To Fred: "If you want to be good to me, don't talk any more against June. Today I realized that your defense of me only engraves June more deeply into that groove of my being. Do you know how I learned this? Yesterday I listened to you, you remember, with a kind of gratitude. I didn't say very much for June. And then this morning I wrote June a love letter, moved by a selfless instinct of protection, as if I were punishing myself for having listened to praise of myself that lessened June's value. And Henry, I know, feels the same way and acts the same way. But I understand all you said and feel and are, and I like you for it, immensely."

Eduardo says to Dr. Allendy, his psychoanalyst, "I don't know if Anaïs loved me or not, whether she fooled me or fooled herself about her feelings."

"She loved you," said Allendy. "I can see that by her preoccupation with you."

"But you don't know her," said Eduardo. "You don't know the extent of her sympathy for others, her power of < self-sacrifice."

To me Eduardo says, "What did happen, Anaïs? What intuition did you have at that moment when you asked me to let you go? What did you realize?"

"Just as I wrote you—an awareness of the importance of your conquering me, to give you the self-confidence you lacked, a stirring of the old love, which we mistook..." Oh, I am slippery.

So he rationalizes, in self-protection. "Then you, too, have a feeling of incest." The frailty of his confidence (If I conquer Anaïs, I have conquered everything) is so pitiable. I acted for his needs. I didn't obey my instincts, my imperative sureness that I want only Henry. But when I think I have done good and been utterly fair, it seems I have done evil, in a subtle, insidious way. I have suggested to Eduardo a doubt about his passion, which has been fostered by psychoanalysis, artificially stimulated by it. The scientific tampering with emotions. For the first time I am against analysis. Perhaps it did help Eduardo to realize his passion, but it does not add to his strength, basically. I feel it is a short-lived thing, something painfully squeezed out, a thin essence pressed out of herbs.

I see similarities between Henry and me in human relationships. I see our capacities for enduring pain when we love, our easily duped natures, our desire to believe in June, our quick rising to defend her from the hatred of others. He talks of beating June, but he would never dare. It is only a wish fulfillment, to dominate what he is dominated by. It is said in
Bubu de Montparnasse
that a woman submits to the man who beats her because he is like a strong government who can also protect her. But Henry's beating would be futile because he is not a protector of woman. He has let himself be protected. June has worked for him like a man, and so she can say, "I have loved him like a child." Yes, and it diminishes her passion. He has let her feel her own strength. And nothing of this can be changed, because it is engraved in both of them. All his life Henry will assert his manhood by destruction and hatred in his work; each time June appears he will bow his head. Now only hatred moves him. "Life is foul, foul," he cries. And with these words he kisses me and awakens me, I who have been sleeping one hundred years, with hallucinations hanging like curtains of spider webs over my bed. But the man who leans over my bed is soft. And he writes nothing about these moments. He doesn't even try to pull the spider webs down. How am I to be convinced the world is foul? "I am no angel. You have only seen me at my best, but wait...

I was dreaming of reading all this to Henry, everything I have written about him. And then I laughed because I could hear Henry saying, "How strange; why is there so much gratefulness in you?" I didn't know why until I read what Fred wrote about Henry: "Poor Henry, I feel sorry for you. You have no gratitude because you have no love. To be grateful one must first know how to love."

Fred's words added to my own about Henry's hatred hurt me. Do I or do I not believe in them? Do they explain the profound amazement I felt, while reading his novel, at the savagery of his attacks on Beatrice, his first wife? At the same time I thought it was I who was wrong, that people must fight and must hate each other, and that hatred is good. But I took love for granted; love can include hatred.

I have constant slips of the tongue and say "John" instead of "Henry" to Hugo. There is no resemblance whatsoever between them, and I cannot understand the association in my mind.

"Listen," I say to Henry, "don't leave me out of your book out of delicacy. Include me. Then we'll see what happens. I expect much."

"But meanwhile," says Henry, "it is Fred who has written three wonderful pages about you. He raves about you, he worships you. I am jealous of those three pages. I wish I had written them."

"You will," I say confidently.

"For example, your hands. I had never noticed them. Fred gives them so much importance. Let me look at them. Are they really as beautiful as that? Yes, indeed." I laugh. "You appreciate other things, perhaps."

"What?"

"Warmth, for instance." I'm smiling, but there are so many fine lacerations that Henry's words open. "When Fred hears me talk about June, he says I do not love you."

Yet he won't let me go. He calls out to me in his letters. His arms, his caresses, and his fucking are voracious. He says, with me, that no amount of thinking (Proust's words, or Fred's, or mine) will stop us from living. And what is living? The moment when he rings at Natasha's door (she is away and I have her place) and immediately desires me. The moment when he tells me he has had no thoughts of whores. I am so idiotically fair and loyal to June in every word I utter about her. How can I deceive myself about the extent of Henry's love when I understand and share his feelings about June?

He sleeps in my arms, we are welded, his penis still in me. It is a moment of real peace, a moment of security. I open my eyes, but I do not think. One of my hands is on his gray hair. The other hand is spread around his leg. "Oh, Anaïs," he had said, "you are so hot, so hot that I can't wait. I must shoot into you quickly, quickly."

Is how one is loved always so important? Is it so imperative that one should be loved absolutely or greatly? Would Fred say of me that I can love because I love others more than I love myself? Or is it Hugo who loves when he goes three times to the station to meet me because I have missed three trains? Or is it Fred, with his nebulous, poetic, delicate comprehension? Or do I love most when I say to Henry, "The destroyers do not always destroy. June has not destroyed you, ultimately. The core of you is a writer. And the writer is living."

"Henry, tell Fred we can go and get the curtains tomorrow."

"I'll come, too," said Henry, suddenly jealous.

"But you know Fred wants to see me, to talk with me." Henry's jealousy pleased me. "Tell him to meet me at the same place as last time."

"About four o'clock."

"No, at three." I was thinking we didn't have enough time together the last day we met. Henry's face is impenetrable. I never know by any sign on it what he feels. There are transitions, yes, when he is flushed and excited, or serious and chastened, or observant and introspective. The blue eyes are analytical, like a scientist's, or moist with feeling. When they are moist I am moved down to my toes because I remember a story about his childhood. His parents (his father was a tailor) used to take him with them on their Sunday outings, visiting, dragging the child along all day and late at night. They sat in the houses of their friends to play cards and smoke. The smoke would grow thick and hurt Henry's eyes. They would put him on the bed in the room next to the parlor, with wet towels over his inflamed eyes.

And now his eyes get tired with proofreading at the newspaper, and I would like to free him of it, and I can't.

Last night I couldn't sleep. I imagined being in Natasha's apartment again with Henry. I wanted to relive the moment when he came into me as we were standing. He taught me to encircle him with my legs. Such practices are so unfamiliar that they bewilder me. Afterwards, the joy bursts upon my senses, because it has unleashed a new kind of desire.

"Anaïs, I feel you, your hotness right down to my toes." In him, too, it is like lightning. He is always amazed by my moisture and my warmth.

Often, though, the passivity of the woman's role weighs on me, suffocates me. Rather than wait for his pleasure, I would like to take it, to run wild. Is it that which pushes me into lesbianism? It terrifies me. Do women act thus? Does June go to Henry when she wants him? Does she mount him? Does she wait for him? He guides my inexperienced hands. It is like a forest fire, to be with him. New places of my body are aroused and burnt. He is incendiary. I leave him in an unquenchable fever.

I have just been standing before the open window of my bedroom and I have breathed in deeply, all the sunshine, the snowdrops, the crocuses, the primroses, the crooning of the pigeons, the trills of the birds, the entire procession of soft winds and cool smells, of frail colors and petal-textured skies, the knotted gray-brown of old trees, the vertical shoots of young branches, the wet brown earth, the torn roots. It is all so savory that my mouth opens, and it is Henry's tongue which I taste, and I smell his breath as he sleeps, wrapped in my arms.

I expect to meet Fred, but it is Henry who comes to the rendezvous. Fred is working. My eyes open wide on Henry, the man who slept in my arms yesterday, and I have chill thoughts. I see his stained hat and the hole in his coat. Another day this would have moved me, but today I realize it is willed poverty, calculated, intentional, out of disdain for the bourgeois who holds a purse carefully. He talks marvelously about Samuel Putman and Eugene Jolas, and his work, and my work and Fred's. But then the Pernod affects him and he tells me of sitting in a cafe with Fred last night after work, and of whores talking to him, and of Fred's looking at him severely, because he had been with me that afternoon and shouldn't have been talking to those women; and they were ugly. "But Fred is wrong," I say, to Henry's surprise. "The whores complement me. I understand the relief a man must feel to go to a woman without demands on his emotions or feelings." And Henry adds, "You don't have to write them letters!" As I laugh he realizes that I understand completely. I even understand his preference for Renoiresque bodies.
Voilà.
Yet I keep this picture of an outraged Fred worshiping me. And Henry says, "That's the nearest I came to being unfaithful to you."

I don't know that I so much want Henry's faithfulness, because I am beginning to realize that the very word "love" tires me today. Love or no love. Fred's saying Henry doesn't love me. I understand the need for relief from complications, and I desire it for myself, only women cannot achieve such a state. Women are romantic.

Suppose I don't want Henry's love. Suppose I say to him, "Listen, we are two adults. I'm sick of fantasies and emotions. Don't mention the word 'love.' Let's talk as much as we want and fuck only when we want it. Leave love out of it." They are all so serious. Just this moment I feel old, cynical. I'm tired of demands, too. For an hour today I feel unsentimental. In a moment I could destroy the entire legend, from beginning to end, destroy everything, except the fundamentals: my passion for June and my worship of Hugo.

Perhaps my intellect is playing another prank. Is that what it is to feel a sense of reality? Where are yesterday's feelings and this morning's, and what about my intuition that Henry instead of Fred would meet me? And what has it all got to do with the fact that Henry was drunk, and that I, not realizing it, read to him about his power to "break" me. He didn't understand, of course, while swimming in the sulphur-colored Pernod.